Its not a Religious Statement, Its a Cultural Statement!!!

I would like to know your thoughts on whether India is really on the track to become a super power in the near future? Below are my thoughts on why we might actually NOT become a super power soon, UNLESS we make an effort to root out the basic problems our society and country has. Do comment.

India will be a super power in the next 15 years, they say, but will it really? With growing insecurity, casteism , crime against women, poverty and the complete apathy towards the public by the political class, are we really going to be a super power? If a nation has to be called a super power, the people of the nation have to be empowered , and have to be provided atleast the basic needs and security. The way our government and politicians work, do not give confidence to me. But then we also need to think, whether we as a society are ready to take the nation ahead in its path to become a super power. Again the confidence is not very strong. Let me give you a few examples.

With the caste system so prevalent in our country, we are not able to think forward without the blinders of caste put onto our eyes. The politicos are more hell bent on treating them as vote bank, rather than eradicating it. People are still considered untouchables here. People are still not allowed into temples. The so called lower castes are not allowed to drink water from the village wells. We have entire villages being burnt down and people killed in the name of caste. Are we really going to be a super power

Brahma Chellaney writes about the strategy of the American president to counter the AfPak problem. I agree to his views and is a good read. Below are a few excerpts. The article can be found here.

Brahma Chellaney says that India is indeed ‘the sponge that protects us all’ from terrorism emanating from Pakistan. The new President’s strategy is compounding the Af-Pak problem

After all, the brunt of escalating terrorism from Pakistan will be borne by India, which already has become, in the words of ex-US official Ashley Tellis, ‘the sponge that protects us all’.

[..]

The Af-Pak problem won’t go away without a fundamental break from the American policies that helped create this terrifying muddle. The US military can never win in Afghanistan, or even secure a ticket out of that country as Obama wants, without first dismantling the Pakistani military’s sanctuaries and sustenance infrastructure for the Taleban and other state-reared terror groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (the group who carried out the Mumbai atrocities) and Jaish-e-Muhammad. As Bush’s national security adviser Stephen Hadley pointed out just before leaving office in January, ‘You can’t really solve Afghanistan without solving Pakistan.’

Yet to mend a broken policy on Pakistan, Obama is doing more of what helped to create the failure — dispensing rewards upfront. He has set out to make Islamabad the biggest recipient of US aid in the world without having first defined benchmarks for judging progress. It was under his predecessor, however, that Pakistan began raking in a terrorist windfall.

About

A peek into a land called India.

A land where we have minorities as those people who are similar in almost everything to the majority, except for the way they pray to god. Still we are looking at reservations for them. A country where the “lower caste” is given reservations to liberate them from the oppression, and the one who benefit from the reservations are the politicians and the “lower caste” people who are already liberated and flush with money. A country where women are revered in temples, while being oppressed immediately outside the steps of the temple. A country where people watch the full coverage of the swearing in ceremony of the US president, while they probably don’t know who our president is and for sure dot know who our vice president is.

A country inspite of all its problems is on the verge of becoming a global power. (So they say)